The Problem with Jealousy

I used to go out with a woman who went solely by her last name. Everyone called her that, just her last name, a name that sounded so much like a man's name that I always thought people treated her differently because of it. A name that implied adventure, danger. I'm not going to reveal it — let's go with "Gunner." I would say, "Gunner's coming over later, after she gets off work." And my friends would exchange glances, or nod to one another, a gesture I knew to mean they wouldn't be around when she showed.

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This woman, a bartender in a skeezy joint I frequented, was tough business. Her dead-eye stare: rough-hewn from nights spent backing down indolent bikers. Her hands: nicked and calloused. Gunner had thrown more punches than anyone I knew and she thought pretty much every one of my friends was — using her phrase here — "pussy to the root." Still, none of that was why they cleared out when I mentioned her name. The simple truth was: Gunner was a jealous woman. She ruined a room with it.

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For whatever reason, I wanted her. She was smart, argumentative, always had whiskey, and never wore a stitch of underwear. To be fair, she declared her jealous nature before we even started seeing one another. And it seemed like no gamble to me because when Gunner talked about jealousy, she made it sound like passion, like a gift that she was willing to give. "This is just how I love someone," she told me. "This is just what I am." In my own way, I thought I could do right by her, and I went forward.

How can I prove the depth of her emotion other than to describe certain chock-a-block rites in the development of a relationship: the furtive glance at a beautiful woman, the running into an old girlfriend, the cataloging of sexual partners, the revelations of past loves? All of this made her angry. With me, she fumed, fussed, steamed, sulked. I'd expected as much; after all, I'd been warned. Then she told my friends that she couldn't bear to even hear the name of any woman I'd ever seen before. She didn't want to hear about my past, she told them. But my past was their past, too, in some ways. And soon after, they started clearing out at the sound of her name rather than living within the narrow demands of her sense of the now.

Poor Gunner. She took deep breaths, her eyes narrowed, and she strung out strings of invectives about other women, steaming about the particulars of my past as if they were hers, about men in general as if they were me. She was, I should say, a beautiful woman, though my first hint that I couldn't live with her was my sense that she was smaller, denser, ugly even when she gave in to this sputtering spirit of Yosemite Sam that lived inside her. I liked her even less when she started to make a show out of keeping her reaction at bay, engaging in a presumptively noble theater of self-control.

For my part, I assumed that if I could just keep my eyes down, avoid flirtation, stay on the straight and narrow, then Gunner would be free to become herself. I was convinced that my behavior was the key to her happiness. I submitted to this delusion, then I submitted some more. So it was that she allowed her jealousy to consume her, and I allowed it to subsume me.

Before it ended, I tried it out for size, this jealousy thing. One night, in the middle of an argument about a woman I worked with, in a twitch of tit-for-tat, I called her out for her friendship with the bar owner, a guy I liked, citing their late-night clean-up sessions.

It was nothing I'd ever been worried about. Not really. I was employing a gesture, one I'd learned from months of living in the dank shadows of another person's jealousy. It became a worry only when I conjured it. And as the scene — the two of them, arms snaked around each other — drew itself up in my mind, I realized that I wanted it to be true, that I could find a wretched delight in the visitation of this thought. "You guys," I snarled. "You, with your mops and your juke box at four in the morning. Tell me!" The words rose, juicy and righteous from my chest. This worked for me, I thought. I liked this shouting, I liked turning the tables, but no part of me really thought this was true. "Tell me nothing ever happened!"

It embarrasses me now to relate that eventually she started crying, that she asked me how I knew. But I hadn't known. Not at all. It was as if I'd created the event, like I'd wrenched it up from the oily bottom of my worries and breathed it into life.

Don't for one minute think that I'm suggesting that jealousy always leads to the truth. This was simply an ugly revelation. The cheap fear which rose out of my blind stab in the narrative dark of Gunner's life led me to years of ritually abusing the trust other women granted me. The cheap pleasures of jealousy undid me, until I consciously decided to leave them behind. Jealousy, I discovered, simply leads nowhere, if not to sadness. I don't hand my happiness over to others with the expectation they will guard it as their own. Doesn't mean I don't hand it over. I do. But, even in love, maybe especially in love, your happiness is your own responsibility.

Freaking Gunner. I must have known the truth that night. She had been honest, in a way. There was no trust with her. No trust at all. She'd said that much from the get-go.